Annually, the CWRU Office of Energy & Sustainability accepts nominations to honor members of the CWRU community working hard on sustainability and climate topics with the Sustainability Champion awards. We are excited to introduce you to the winners for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Maia Gallagher is the student award winner and will be graduating in May with a major in Civil Engineering and a minor in Physics. Gallagher is a longtime member of the Student Sustainability Council (SSC) where she has served as its Chair (Fall 2018-Fall 2019), Co-vice Chair (Spring 2018), and Farm Harvest Festival Co-chair (2018). She has also lived in the Sustainability House during the past two years, most recently serving as house leader. When not studying or tending to sustainable needs, Gallagher enjoys writing and going for walks in the woods. She was nominated by many student peers.
Siu Yan Scott is this year’s staff Sustainability Champion and serves as the Registrar for CWRU’s School of Medicine. She is a 2017 graduate of the Cuyahoga County Master Recycler Program and a member of the Ohio Advisory Board for The Trust for Public Land. Scott founded the HEC Community Cutlery Library program to reduce single-use plastic use in events at the HEC and is passionate about new ways to create awareness and collaborative relationships to address sustainability issues. COVID-19 interrupted plans for the first near-zero waste event at the School of Medicine's Match Day but Scott is committed to renewing these efforts next Spring with partners Rust Belt Riders, CWRU Food Recovery Network, and the CWRU Office of Energy & Sustainability. Scott was nominated by her coworkers in the School of Medicine.
Dr. Beverly Zella Saylor is this year’s faculty Sustainability Champion. She is the Armington Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Saylor is a geologist whose work on the sedimentary formations includes studies of past environmental change in Namibia, Bolivia, Ethiopia, and across North America, spanning the last billion years of Earth history. She also studies sedimentary rocks as repositories for fluids including CO2 storage. Dr. Saylor teaches a First Seminar on environmental decisions and upper-level geology courses, including a field course near Death Valley. Dr. Saylor was nominated by a number of her students.
We are thrilled to honor this year’s Champions and thankful for their work to further CWRU’s sustainability and climate goals.